Where The Heart Is Part 20

T HE WHITECOTTON PLACE was a mile off a rutted dirt road, a county road, but it had been two years since the blade of a grader had touched it. The land, cleared for pasture half a century earlier, rolled toward a shallow creek dotted with scrub oak and bois d'arc. HE WHITECOTTON PLACE was a mile off a rutted dirt road, a county road, but it had been two years since the blade of a grader had touched it. The land, cleared for pasture half a century earlier, rolled toward a shallow creek dotted with scrub oak and bois d'arc.

Novalee turned the Toyota into the graveled drive shaded by sweet gum trees, their leaves already turning wine and gold. The house was a dignified two-story with a broad screened-in porch and wide steps lined with pots of geraniums.

Moses stepped out the front door as Novalee maneuvered Americus from her car seat.

"Have any trouble finding us?" Moses asked.

"No, not once I crossed Sticker Creek."

Americus squealed and held out her arms to Moses before Novalee had reached the top of the steps.

"Miss Americus!" he said as he lifted her to his chest.

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The porch, dark and cool, was a jungle of moonseed vines and snakeroot, Algerian ivy and b.u.t.terfly weed. A half-dozen fis.h.i.+ng rods leaned together in one corner and work boots toed the edge of newspapers beside the door.

Two heavy easy chairs sat arm to arm in the middle of the porch, but it was several moments before Novalee noticed that one of them held a tiny gnarled man.

"Novalee, this is my father, Purim Whitecotton."

The old man smiled at her with the side of his face that still worked, but the broken side, the side with the hooded eye and sagging lip, had shut down on his last birthday, his eighty-third, when he bent to blow out candles on an angel food cake and a blood vessel exploded in his temple.

"h.e.l.lo," Novalee said.

His left hand, defective . . . useless, fingers twisted and curled toward his palm, lay in his lap like some long-owned geegaw . . .

worthless, but too familiar to throw away. He offered his good hand- palsied, warted and scarred, discolored like bruised fruit-but good.

Veins, intricate purple skeins, webbed across the back of his hand and his skin, cool and soft, felt like fine, creased silk. And when Novalee touched it, she heard the lines of a poem she had read.

. . . ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. human blood in human veins.

For a moment, the words seemed to echo and Novalee thought she might have said them out loud.

"Daddy, look here," Moses said. "Look at Miss Americus Nation."

Purim Whitecotton's good eye narrowed as it found and focused on Americus. Then he tried to speak, tried to make his broken lips Where the Heart Is 161.

speak, but a sound somewhere back in his mouth, a strangled sound back of his tongue, was all he could manage. But Moses had learned his father's language, knew what he wanted, so he stepped closer and when he did, the old man reached up and put one thin trembling finger to Americus' cheek. She held very still, hardly seemed to breathe until he lowered his hand-and then she smiled at him.

Novalee turned toward the swoosh of the screen door as a tall woman in blue linen stepped onto the porch.

"Well, I declare," she said, "I didn't know our company was here."

"Novalee, I'd like you to meet my wife, Certain," Moses said.

Certain Whitecotton had a halo of silver hair, and copper-colored skin, unblemished except for a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. When she smiled, her eyes, just a shade lighter than sage, caught the light and s.h.i.+mmered like clear gla.s.s splashed by rain.

She took Novalee's hand and closed it inside her own, then held it still as if they were sealing a promise.

"Moses been saying some nice things about you, Novalee. So nice, I thought you might be a fairy tale."

"I'm pleased to meet you."

Then Certain turned to Americus, still in Moses' arms. "So! Here's the lady who stole my husband's heart."

Americus was clearly happy to be at the center of their attention.

"Can't imagine how," Certain said. "Unless it's that smile spread from here to St. Louis."

Americus ducked her head, pressed her face into Moses' shoulder . . . a brief flirtation with shyness.

"Oh, yes. That's a powerful smile," Certain said.

"What smile?" Moses asked. "I never saw no smile."

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"Novalee, has Moses offered you something to drink? We have cider."

"Thank you, but I'm not thirsty."

"Well, I know you two want to get out back, so I won't try to keep you here with small talk or cider." Though Certain seemed to be talking to Novalee and Moses, she was looking at Americus as she spoke. "But when you finish, we'll have us some pie and coffee and get better acquainted."

"Don't let her kid you, Novalee. She wants us to leave so she can get her hands on Americus."

"Me? Now who is it standing here acting like an old fool over that baby?"

"I was speaking truth and you know it."

"Moses, give me that child and get on out of here."

"Now Mother . . ."

Then it was over. Certain slipped Americus from Moses' arms and into her own. But as she did, as she and Moses touched, something pa.s.sed between them . . . something dark and sad that made him lower his eyes and caused her to turn her face away, as if each could not bear to see the sorrow of the other-as if the handing over of a child could break their hearts.

Moses said, "Certain, are you . . ."

"We'll be fine," she said. "We'll be just fine."

"Are you sure?" Novalee asked. "She can be a handful sometimes 'cause she's teething right now and-"

"Don't you worry," Certain said as she settled into one of the easy chairs with Americus on her lap. "You all go out there and have fun.

Father Whitecotton and I can manage this child just fine."

"You won't spoil her, will you, Mother?" Moses tried to sound playful again, but his voice was a little too flat.

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"Not before you make it out back," Certain said, and though she smiled at him, the smile had pain in it.

"Out back" was a rough-hewn oak cabin some two hundred feet behind the house.

"This is where I was born," Moses said. "My father built it, more than sixty years ago."

The windows were covered with gingham curtains, and a harvest wreath of gourds and dried flowers hung on the door.

"It looks like a playhouse."

"Well, that's Certain's doing."

The front room looked bigger inside than Novalee had expected even though it warehoused the castoffs of earlier generations-coal oil lamps, a wooden wheelchair, quilting frames.

"Certain comes in here from time to time . . . airs the place out.

Threatens to clean, but . . ."

Moses stepped through a doorway and into the old kitchen, now his darkroom. As Novalee followed his path through a maze of boxes, she spotted a rocking horse half hidden beneath the front window.

"Moses, do you and Certain have children?"

The cabin was absolutely still for several moments, then Novalee could hear Moses moving again, moving around in the darkroom, switching on lights, opening drawers.

"Never can lay hands on those scissors when I need 'em," he said.

Novalee tried again. "I said, do you and Certain-"

"Come on in here and you can see how I get set up."

Novalee knew then she had asked the wrong question.

There wasn't much "kitchen" left in the low-ceilinged room: a wall 164 cabinet without any doors and a galvanized sink, stained and discolored. Nothing else to suggest the place where families had been fed, wounds doctored, babies bathed.

Now it was a darkroom. Work tables had been squeezed in, shelves shoved into corners. The cabinet was crammed with bottles, cans, boxes and jars. Long shallow pans covered tabletops and counters.

And everywhere . . . photographs. Photographs hung from a clothesline stretched across the room. They leaned against books, stuck out of drawers, stood in files; were packed in boxes and tacked on walls.

"Now as soon as I find that developer, we'll be set," Moses said.

"Is it okay if I look through some of your pictures?"

"Sure." Moses began pawing through bottles in a box on the floor. "Wonder what I did with that fixer?"

Novalee picked up a stack of photographs on a table by the door, pictures taken on the steps of a church, black men in dark suits and broad-brimmed hats, women in spring dresses with tatted lace collars, children squinting into the sun, their hands clutching Easter baskets and Bibles.

Novalee picked up another handful of pictures from a narrow shelf that ran across one wall. These had been shot on a street she didn't recognize, a tired, dusty street with tired, dusty people. In one, a teenage boy hunkered outside a pool hall, his face pulled into a scowl. In another an old woman gazed with disinterest into the window of a cafe. And in another a little boy sitting on a curb, his face smeared with grime, watched a bony cat carry a dead bird across an empty street.

"These are good."

"What have you got there?"

Novalee held the pictures out for him to see.

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"Shot those in Tangier, out in the western part of the state. Two, maybe three years ago."

As soon as she put those back on the shelf, she scooped up more.

These pictures were older, many brittle and yellowed with age. She flipped through them quickly . . . a barbershop, a parade, some fences.

She looked at hawks, horses and sunsets, then came to the last of them, the one on the bottom of the stack, a photograph in grainy black and white. Purim Whitecotton, strong and whole, feet firmly planted on the back of a flatbed truck, body straining to lift a hundred pounds of baled hay. Purim Whitecotton, muscles pus.h.i.+ng against the sleeves of a stained white s.h.i.+rt, tendons corded across the backs of thick, broad hands. Purim Whitecotton, fierce dark eyes, eyes that would dare and resist, eyes that would be subdued by nothing except a tiny explosion inside his head when he would bend over eighty-three candles on an angel food cake.

And that's when she knew she was hooked! Even as Moses began showing her the way . . . as he stared into the pans of amber liquid . .

. whispering to the images swimming just under the surface, urging them to life, Novalee knew.

Later, while Moses was cleaning up the last of it, and after she had wandered back into the other room, she stood beside the rocking horse beneath the window. It was handmade of pine with marbles for eyes and tufts of rope for a mane. Novalee put her hand on its head and set it rocking, and when she did, the only sound in the cabin was its rhythmic creaking. Then, from the darkroom, Moses' voice . . .

"We had Glory."

"What?"

"We had Glory. But we lost her when she was three."

Novalee put her hand on the horse, stilled its rocking.

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"Certain got rid of the other stuff . . ." He turned on a tap in the darkroom, ran water into a basin. "Topper. Glory called him Topper- Hopalong Ca.s.sidy's horse." A cabinet door slammed. "See that mark on the back of its head? Between its ears?"

Novalee bent to examine the wood and found a tiny chip, right between the ears.

"Glory's front tooth made that. She fell and cracked her mouth, busted her lip."

Novalee rubbed her finger across the dent, a dent just about as wide as Americus' front tooth, her first.

"Glory cried. Cried, she said, 'cause she bit Topper." Moses turned off the water, then Novalee heard the ping of metal against gla.s.s.

"We lost her in the spring. That spring. Drowned in Sticker Creek."

The cabin was quiet again.

"You can't see the creek from here, but it's down the hill . . . down below that pecan tree."

Novalee stepped to the front window and parted the gingham curtains.